'Playing by ear'
Section 4
Radio drama in a Drama Department
4.1 Teaching the 'invisible play'
So how do all these issues inform my teaching? In the rest
of this article, I will look at the adjustments I find I need
in teaching drama students, and then I will summarise radio drama
from my work in theatre.
I have to find ways of dove-tailing a course on radio drama
into a drama department - 'texts' which are neither literary
nor theatrical. Radio entails some theoretical positions which
are not central to drama. I make cultural-materialist and media
issues welcome, and links are there with drama history and performance.
Theorising sound has a growing research base, as I explained
above (2.2), and forms part
of the overall place in a university for 'a global and thorough,
generalist and universal way of thinking' (Pavis, 2000, 68).
But there are changes to be explained to students who are trained
in text, live performance but non-text, and 'canonised' plays,
rather than broadcast, mediated one-offs. (Obviously, my lectures
cover the 'classical' radio canon.) A further problem is the
possible mis-match between the audiences of radio plays and my
students. So what is the territory of radio drama? Stage? Literature?
Film? Multi-media? Radio drama as an 'art form' of itself?
I find myself giving a priority emphasis to text, playwright,
director and institution, and to aesthetics. Then there is genre,
formalist analysis, reception studies, the 'grammar' of aural
design, and the list goes on (Radio Drama site). That is typical of work
in a British drama department. (As David Mayer wisely said: 'Many
of us, in the belief that aesthetic criteria matter, have gone
on to teach drama', Mayer, 1977, 257. And more about 'text' shortly
below.) I have already said it is crucial that most of radio
drama consists of one-off plays. This was Brandt's emphasis in
his study of TV drama (Brandt 1981), though in those decades
when UK TV channels commissioned original plays.
4.2 Listener demographics
Frankly, the few of us who are teachers of radio drama, have
to face the mismatch - as opposed to our colleagues in film,
television and performance studies - between the listener demographic
of B.B.C. Radio 3 and Radio 4 plays, and the average age of our
students. The research department of the B.B.C. works with audience
profiles and the information is available in commissioning documents,
and some is online in ‘Writing Drama For B.B.C. Radio’.
In my experience, that often means a gap of some thirty-five
years between radio audiences and students. Students average
around twenty-two in my classes and the demographic of the Radio
Four play listener is fifty-four years to fifty-seven. (I know
I have overstated this problem.)
Few of my students, on starting the course, have listened
much to speech radio. But they are enquiring. There are some
radio playwrights who are known from theatre: the classics such
as Howard Barker and others of the 'canon' mentioned above, and
for example, Michelene Wandor, Bryony Lavery and Louise Page.
We explore how, in the Radio 4 afternoon plays, popular culture
can be serious and trivial and banal (Baudrillard), authentic
and the opposite, oppressive and oppositional. I encourage my
students to see both ends of the spectrum of studying the popular
(if that is what radio plays are) - the undiscriminating celebration
of the popular and the pessimistic condemnation of mass ideological
manipulation - and all there is in between. Is the radio play
more 'play' (stage) or story (oral narrative), or even film?
Studying radio drama means crossing borders but also into the
territory of radio drama as an 'art form'. (The practitioners
called it that nearly from the beginning, in hope.)
4.3 Entertaining
So, the bulk of radio drama is passing entertainment. Students
cannot fetishize plays. They have to listen to a range of the
broadcasting flow and they have to 'let go' of many of these
plays. I have already raised some of these culturalist issues
(2.4 and also 3.9
on the B.B.C. as 'Hollywood'). In my classes, that means some
careful discussion of reception theory and studies. When the
students have heard a range of plays, I encourage an emphasis
on the pleasures of consumption and less on the oppositional.
And yet it also means acknowledging that consumption is not totally
unresistant. The course materials here are mostly from media
studies. (See 'Reception'.)
I find myself most at home in Jostein Gripsrud's study of
TV audience reception, The Dynasty Years. He acknowledges
the postmodernist emphasis on reception theory and studies. But
he balances this with other aspects of the subject area. He makes
a negotiated defence of the traditional position to emphasise
the 'powerful role of production in the process of media communication'
(Gripsrud, 1995, 18). I find this a welcome corrective.
Gripsrud has also found trail-blazing ways of investigating
what Morley 1980 terms the 'preferred/dominant reading' (12,
40). He also refers to changing relations between high and low/popular
culture, and aesthetic 'transgressions'. It helps that the focus
of his large study is something as approachable as the 'Dynasty'
series.
The radio play matters for its artistic merits and because
of its long, self-reflexive history. Of course I wish to balance
or counter anti-elitism in university syllabuses (compare Gripsrud,
1995, 18 and his defence of '"traditional" critical
positions'). And though I value Tulloch 1990 on TV drama, in
addition to his valuable culturalist work, I also prefer a close
engagement with the text.
4.4 'Is there a text in this classroom?'
Radio plays are mysterious, for they are evanescent and yet
recorded. Students rarely have a printed script available of
a radio play, though the B.B.C. stores these in the Written Archives
in Caversham. So technically, the 'text' of a radio play exists.
For me, the broadcast production is the ‘text’ for
all radio plays, except those in the ‘canon’ (3.4).
But text is a contested theoretical area, all the more so in
radio. Does the text always exist as an entity apart from the
reader?
Stanley Fish famously asked ' Is there
a text in this classroom?' (Fish 1980) and raised the possibility
of its non-existence. Gripsrud, from communications studies,
replied (contra Fish) that the text is a 'definable object separate
from both producers and recipients' and it is the 'primary link
between producers and audiences' (Gripsrud, 1995, 9). Drama students
come from other courses mainly dependent on 'the playscript,
both as a standard of excellence and as the foremost implement
of theatre research' (Mayer, 1977, 257). Note
1. My students are confronted with piles of cassettes and
CDs, and live broadcast.
So I use the term text, relying on cultural semiotics and
film studies, with more confidence of radio drama than of radio
as a whole. Each play has a tune-in and a cut-off, and is narrative,
fictional and with closure. It has its own valid, overall organisation
or network or system. This latter is what Metz says of film (Metz,
1974, 63). However, I have difficulty with 'text' as applied
across each and every radio genre (talk, music, sports, etc.).
The 'system' and the particular 'network in which everything
holds together' (Metz) is so different in the flow of broadcasting,
and 'text' presumes that all meaning is built on the model of
language. So Andrew Crisell says of radio: 'There is no …
text' (Crisell, 1994, 5).
As one of the projects on my course, we dispense with script
altogether and student teams devise scenes in speedy ways. The
director holds the microphone and mini-disk machine, and two
actors are recorded in a location suited to their improvised
dialogue (such as ending their affair in a pub, revealing a secret
on a park bench, or in a crowded classroom, walking through the
main street). This needs preparation but as the recording technology
can almost 'disappear', the actors are captured in their location
and with minimum other interference (and later edited).
Student actors at the microphone
Notes for Section 4
Note 1
David Mayer also mentioned 'our prolonged emphasis on the
literary qualities of drama and … our dependence upon the
playscript' (Mayer, 1977, 257). Obviously, a couple of decades
of performance theory has shifted discussion here considerably.
For a definition of text, see Watson and Hill, 1997, 233 (quoting
Saunders and Fiske 1983): '''a signifying structure composed
of signs and codes which is essential to communication",
and in a variety of forms: film, speech, writing, painting'.
Gripsrud's discussion emphasises how, in textual studies,
the reader emerged as a central figure. He counters the 'most
extreme position taken [which] does away with the notion of the
text as a carrier of meaning altogether' (Gripsrud, 1995, 9),
though acknowledging that a precise definition of text is quite
impossible (13).
Guralnick, 1996, xi-xii discusses the primacy of the broadcast
product as against the printed text and comes out in favour of
the latter: 'Despite the clear danger - that in reading without
listening, we may overlook the radio in radio drama - the demands
of close reading should protect against the risk.' I am strongly
contra, although there are more complicated issues in how the
listener receives and re-receives the canonical plays she discusses
(Beckett, Stoppard, etc.), and the place of such texts in pedagogy.
But these plays have had only one production in the BBC, almost
without exception ('All That Fall'). There is the 'auteur' issue,
as the playwrights worked closely on the radio Studio productions.
The broadcast is 'authorial' for me. BACK
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